Western Goodness

We’re out of the mountains, momentarily, and down in the city of Xichang (the name’s meaning is the title of this post). The last three days were quite a ride, but we’re happy to be trading the inevitable surprises of rural bus travel for the relative certainty of train schedules tomorrow. And today we’re enjoying a whole lot of doing nothing, which in Owen’s case means keeping extremely busy. And this city is perfect for that.

At First Sight of Beautiful Girl, We See a Good Reason to Spend the Night

On Saturday, I lost my voice. I blame a combination of coal dust, secondhand smoke inhalation, and lack of soap in the bathrooms. Saturday was also the day we began our bus trip across a slice of particularly rural Sichuan province. We decided to cut through the Yi Autonomous Region, ostensibly in order to reach the train line in Xichang, but our real reason for coming through here was just to see what’s going on in these parts.

Postcard from Leibo

We’re in Leibo, Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture, a county seat perched high on a cliffside over the Jinsha River. We got here in just 3+ hours from Yibin, due to the modern marvel of the new gorge-spanning, mountain-piercing highway. This place is being opened up, and that’s probably a very good thing.